Midterm Elections: The Day After

TWIN FALLS, Idaho (KLIX) – County officials were experiencing “election hangover” on Wednesday. A busy turnout at the polls kept them up until late Tuesday night.

More than 24,000 voters came to the polls in Twin Falls County. Many registered at the polling stations, said Elections Director Valerie Varadi, and several precincts ran out of register cards.

She said running out of cards was really the only hiccup that some officials saw on Tuesday.

“The turnout was fantastic. It was a really good day,” she said. “We knew the turnout was going to be good.”

Varadi said the big issues that brought people out was the governor’s race and the two propositions.

In the governor’s race, Brad Little beat Democrat contender Paulette Jordan, 60 percent statewide to Jordan’s 39.7 percent, according to the Associated Press. The ballot measures saw that 53.4 percent of voters said no to Proposition 1, which would have authorized betting on historical horse racing in the Gem State. Voters were more kind to Proposition 2, which expands Medicaid coverage, with 60.4 percent casting their ballots in favor of the measure.

Varadi said that during the last midterm elections in 2014 Twin Falls County had 32,393 registered voters, of which 55 percent turned out at the polls. “This election we had a 70 percent turnout,” she said, or 24,888 out of 35,071 registered voters who cast their ballots. (During the presidential election in 2017 the county saw 76 percent voter turnout.)

Jerome County officials also had a late night as election volunteers kept busy at the precincts, said Elections Supervisor Cy Lootens.

“It went late into the night, but everything went well,” Lootens said. “We didn’t have any issues.”

He said more ballots were cast in this midterm election than the last one, but the percentage of voters who turned out at the polls Tuesday was about the same as it was in 2014 because there are more registered voters this time. That year the county had some 5,300 registered voters and 67 percent turnout. This year there was around 8,500 registered voters.

A lot of people registered on Election Day, Lootens said.

“There were a lot of unopposed races and that probably didn’t help much,” he said. “But a lot of people came out because they were interested in the governor’s race and two propositions.”